A while back I came across a very interesting blog entry by Olga Morawczynski titled "What you don’t know about M-PESA". It gave some interesting insight into the behind the scenes effort it took to bring the successful M-PESA product to launch. M-PESA is definitely the most successful MMT application to date, and is consistently used as an example and standard for all other global mobile money transfer deployments. However there tends to be a misconception that M-PESA was a preconceived idea that had clearly defined business processes and functional requirements and thus was executed in one shot by simply applying the normal development and testing process for any software initiative.

Olga's blog dispels this myth, and shows how M-PESA underwent many iterations of the concept, business process flows and software application.  As she highlights: "Furthermore, the design of the application interface and entire system underwent several iterations. It began as a tool for the repayment of MFI loans. It was launched as a P2P transfer service. Such changes were made because the pilot team did their research, and closely monitored usage patterns. Their findings in the field were then fed back into the design of the application. The team explained that to react to these changes, they focused on flexible design. This has paid off generously as M-PESA moves across other contexts, which have very different needs and usage patterns."

I have been advising my mobile financial services clients to approach their service offerings in the same way; i.e. to adopt a very iterative and flexible approach to both the business concept as well as any application development. The rationale being that this is a very nascent industry that is very dependent on target demographics and their usage patterns. A successful mobile financial product will be the one that morphs and adapts to the daily usage needs and patterns of subscribers, especially as they adopt this new medium. It was good to see this advice validated by the M-PESA experience.